The present invention relates to a riding situation guiding management system for detecting the number of passengers and a crowdedness degree for transportation means such as Shinkansen trains, passenger trains, route buses, or the like, and for conducting management in order to provide such information to passengers in advance.
When the timetable or train diagram is to be revised for the Shinkansen, passenger trains, route buses, or the like, investigation on traffic amount, such as measurements of the number of passengers and a crowdedness degree in cars, is made for the purpose of relieving extremely crowded cars, planning economical assignment of cars, and so on. For this investigation on traffic amount, much greater number of persons as before are employed to manually count the number of passengers at desired locations and totalize the thus collected data.
There is also a case of a transportation system, where the number of passengers is counted at each of a separately provided exclusive entrance and exit at each bus stop for route buses, and data on the number of passengers are collected and analyzed such that the data is utilized for revising the timetable of the route buses.
However, the above-mentioned conventional investigation based on the counting of the number of passengers requires a great number of persons and much time, because a measurer must be located at each of the desired locations for counting passengers in a so-called human sea tactics manner. In addition, since the collection and analysis of the measured data require several days, the data cannot be put to practical use immediately. Nevertheless, a riding situation in any car of any train or in any bus is always changing from one minute to the next, and passengers generally desire to select an appropriate train in accordance with such changes so as to travel to a destination as comfortably and rapidly as possible.
For example, assuming that a person takes "Hikari-go" of the Tokaido Shinkansen from Shinyokohama Station to Shinosaka Station for a business trip, if he cannot have a seat in a car he has got on, he must walk along cars for a vacant seat or he must be kept standing all the way for a long time, at least until the train arrives at Nagoya Station, which is the next stop in this case, where some passengers, who have been seated, may get off the train. Another case shows that even if several cars are extremely crowded with passengers, vacant seats may be found in the leading car of the same train. It can be said in this case that the train is PG,4 transporting in an inefficient manner.
As is apparent also from the above-mentioned cases, the number of passengers and riding situations in cars of the Shinkansen, passenger trains, and so on as well as in route buses, cannot be revealed from a minute to the next to give such information to passengers waiting for a train or a bus in forward stations or bus stops, so that services for offering comfortable travel cannot be prepared for the passengers.